The Crawlers (1991)

Big city girl Josie (Mary Sellers) has just arrived back in her small Alaskan hometown for an extended stay with her mother and kid brother, and decides to possibly reconcile with her former high school boyfriend Matt (Jason Saucier) while she's there. Down at the nearby nuclear power plant, illegal chemical dumping (part of an obligatory and half-assed cover-up subplot) has resulted in animated, super-intelligent, radioactive tree roots that are killing everyone off. Victims include an obnoxious sheriff, a female hitchhiker passing through town, a farmer and his wife, a hooker with a heart of gold and a gas station attendant and his pet dog Chester. The roots mostly just trip or strangle people and make a hilarious whip-cracking noise whenever they attack. They also make a (toy) helicopter explode by pulling it about two feet to the ground. During the film's one and only bloody scene, the roots go into a guy's mouth and then poke the eyeball out of a mannequin head. And that's about all she wrote with this dull-as-dishwater waste of time, which would be totally forgotten by now if not for a misleading title change linking it to the notoriously awful camp classic TROLL 2. So be forewarned, no trolls make an appearance in CONTAMINATION.7 (aka TROLL 3). Hell, there aren't even any goblins.And unfortunately, while TROLL 2 failed in an enjoyable awful way, this one fails to reach that film's same level of redeeming unintentional hilarity. Though thoroughly inept, it's also boring, clichéd, slow-moving and far too tame to really be enjoyable. The fact they used inexperienced local "talent" to fill out the cast, along with providing these laughably bad amateur thesps with truly rotten dialogue throughout the film, is the only point of possible enjoyment, though even that got old quickly.Probably best known as THE CRAWLERS here in the States, though the version I viewed was titled CREEPERS. Don't know if that's a cut version of this film or not, but I highly doubt it. I'm also not sure of Joe D'Amato's actual involvement since his name (or "David Hills" for that matter) is nowhere to be found in the credits. Only one director is listed and that's "Martin Newlin;" the same alias used by Fabrizio Laurenti for the Linda Blair/David Hasselhoff film WITCHERY (1988).

The Crawlers (USA) Troll 3 (USA) Troll III: Contamination Point 7 Creepers (UK)Creepers, Crawlers, Contamination point seven, you can call it whatever you want. But please don't call it troll 3! If it wasn't bad enough that Troll 2 didn't have any trolls in it, Troll 3 doesn't even have anything that resembles trolls in it. I suppose in some perverse way, this means that it fit's in quite well in the series. It is as proportionally less like 'Troll 2' , as 'Troll 2' is unlike 'Troll'. If you get my meaning. Let's quickly recap the plotsTroll: A troll enters a block of flats, and one by one turns each apartment into a magical woodland, and all the people into elves. A boy called Harry Potter learns magic (!) from a witch and attempts to save the dayTroll 2: A group of nasty vegetarian goblins attempt to lure unsuspecting humans to eat their green goo, in order to turn the people into vegetables to be eaten. A young boy and his dead grandpa attempt to save the day.Troll 3: A town is attacked by a mass of evil radioactive tree roots, and as people are killed off, our heroes try to hide the nuclear waste and attempt to save the day.Now to say that they all have nothing to do with each other would be a tad unfair. As you can see, there is a definite running theme of anti-vegetarianism/ environmentalism. Yes, in every movie it's all things natural that become the source of all the suffering. Creepers, in the end, however, just doesn't live up to the standard set by it's predecessor. It is generally very dull, with awful acting, toy bulldozers, no SFX (with the exception of a tree root winding through someone's face). But the film does set up an interesting thought. Just exactly what would 'Troll 4' be like if it were to follow in the trend of this series?So basically it would have to have fierce anti-plant themes to it, and leave some people in peril, who save the day by doing something ridiculousI'm thinking flowers. A backward red neck town gets attacked by a gang of mutant sunflowers (or whatever), and the locals group together and make a plan to save the day by blocking out the sun, killing all forms of chlorophyll-induced life in the areaSo there we have it … Troll 4 in the making.Oh, and back to troll 3, it's entertaining in a bad way, but don't expect a Troll 2 style masterpieceConclusion, Worth it, but only for completion purposes.

The future of bad movies seemed grim and uncertain during the mass-destruction of the American drive-ins...but with dreck like THE CRAWLERS continuing to pop up, there may be hope for the future of schlock after all. About the film...it involves a small town being threatened by creeping carnivorous tree roots(rubber garden hoses, in all honesty). Take this hopeless premise to further lows by putting it in unsteady hands of monolithic movie-making incompetence. Now, provide a cast of featureless thesps, and give the dire results of these efforts a misleading re-title which implies that it's a follow-up to something which in no possible way could have generated enough enthusiasm to merit such an endeavor. PRESTO! there you have it. Instant bad-movie gold.I own a copy, and you should, too. 3.5/10

This movie was so ridiculous I had to continuously check the counter on my VCR to see how much time was left. There were barely any good lines in the film. I thought it would at least come close to the masterpiece of Troll 2, but I should have known nothing will ever come close to that A+ piece of work. I believe the cast had more potential to make us laugh but apparently the director tried too hard to be serious. I try not to get caught up in things like logic in these kinds of movies, but I mean come on !!! the helicopter exploded two feet from the ground. Anyway, when I found out there was a sequel to Troll 2, I thought it would be superb, but obviously I was wrong. At least I only paid $1.75 for the VHS copy, and as a friend of mine pointed out, it's really sad when the shipping of a movie out weighs the actual cost. Anyways, don't bother even renting this movie, just watch Troll 2 an excessive amount of times.